I get what you’re saying, but I think it’s a bit pessimistic. The average person and the people below are only 50% of all people. There’s a lot of us who absolutely hate and avoid this slop shit. Making music has never been super lucrative for the average musician, and the era of megastars was ultimately a small blip in this history of music. I’m a musician myself, but I don’t do it for the money, I do it because I find it fun and rewarding. I’d imagine most musicians feel the way I do (I know many musicians, even a few with smaller record contracts, and none of them can live just off of the money that make from music. They still make the music tho, because it isn’t about the money. The most popular artists are by nature lowest common denominator, many of them intentionally so, because those people care most about the money, so they make the safest music, blurring the lines of art and business.